Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 207: Sun Jul 28

La Voleuse (Chapot, 1966): ICA Cinema, 4pm


This film is part of the excellent Marguerite Duras season at the ICA (full details here).

ICA introduction:
Werner (Michel Piccoli) and Julia (Romy Schneider), are a middle-class French-speaking couple who live in Berlin. Unable to conceive, Julia confesses to her husband that she gave up a child to a working class Polish couple when she was a teenager. Having articulated this for the first time, the child, now six years old, becomes an obsession, and she begins to stalk him. For a film scripted by Marguerite Duras, La Voleuse is fairly conventional, but its subject resonates with many themes and motifs that she revisited throughout her literary and cinematic work: the abandoned child; belated, compulsive grief; class divisions…


"Jean Chapot offered me the role of Julia. As soon as I read the synopsis, my mind was made up: it was a dream role, offering the possibility of expressing the full range of feelings experienced by a young woman, from grief to exacerbated passion to resignation. I would be able to be sweet and tender, but also to scream and rage like someone possessed.” (Romy Schneider)


This screening will be the UK premiere of the 4K restoration.

Here (and above) are the opening credits.

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